Trash Talk from an Automotive Archeologist

from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

I don't know what they're smoking in Oregon--well, yes I do, yes I do--but according to a newspaper article by Robert J. Hawkins, there is at least one person there making a comfortable living by figuring out the obvious. Kelley Styring is--well, I don't know: a consultant, I guess, who does things like survey people about their cars. More specifically, she has been going around asking people what sort of stuff they have in their cars; she even does a little archeological work on various vehicles, sifting through the interior to find stuff under the seats and stuffed down behind the cushions (hey, it's a living). Then she peddles her findings to various automotive manufacturers, who have been blithely building cars for over a century without ever having a clue about what we really want our cars to do.

Article continues after advertisement

Apparently, most of us want them to serve as trash compactors.
That is, Styring seems to have discovered a penchant for littering--not the pristine roadside, but the interior of our cars. Now, this may seem obvious to anybody blessed with children, whose tendency to leave a messy wake wherever they go convinced me long ago to drive only small sports cars in which there was no room for the little darlings. But apparently, even otherwise civilized adults are in the habit of filling their cars with cast-off fast-food wrappers and empty Big Gulp containers. Thankfully, we are at least concerned with personal grooming: Stuffed into every nook and cranny of our cars, according to Styring, are enough napkins from diners and fast-food joints to be recycled and save an entire forest.
Investigating our cup-holders--who knew cars have cup-holders these days?!--Styring found an interesting human tendency. We evidently keep all sorts of things in cup-holders, from cell phones to another wad of those ubiquitous napkins--everything but beverages.
And our cars are filthy: desiccated French fries, unidentifiable decaying masses of what may once have been food, and crumbs: bread crumbs, cracker crumbs, crumbs from the congealed breading on fried shrimp, and so on.
This element alone convinces me that Styring is hanging out with the wrong crowd, because the sports-car junkies I know would never tolerate such horrible conditions, even the ones who let the exterior of the car go a little longer between waxings than they should. (Yes, I count myself among this tribe, but that's because I spent so many years living in a place where a clean car becomes unrecognizably filthy within half a mile of driving on the muddy roads. Now that I live in a place where clean cars are the norm, and they stay that way for weeks or months, I am trying to rehabilitate myself.) Even my rally cars, which admittedly pile up with the teeming refuse of a weekend spent missing as many trees as possible, were usually swamped out once the rally was over.
Okay, there was the Bit-O-Honey incident, but that was an anomaly. It is true that one time while I was doing something to my rally Saab, I came across a Bit-O-Honey. More specifically, I came across one unit of Bit-O-Honeyness; these nougats came in packets of several, each wrapped in wax paper, and this errant Bit had gone astray during some former woodsy adventure. But I could not recall actually buying a Bit-O-Honey, or eating most of it, so the number of years it had lain in dormant slumber was unknown. It had obviously been in situ long enough for the wax-paper wrapping to become fused with the nougat below, and the nougat itself had ossified to a state approaching granite; but I found that after it had been munched and molarized for a time, the nougat eventually softened, becoming a filler-extracting taffy, while the wax paper resolved itself into a pretty good spitwad.
Now, I have not read the book that came of all this research--In Your Car: Road Trip Through The American Automobile--but I note that Styring's recommendations for what should be built into cars include central vacuum systems; what, you don't have a garage?! She also wants some sort of audible reminder when you have groceries in the trunk, lest you wander off and leave a week's comestibles to go all Bit-O-Honey on you. Let's see: You drive to the grocery store, load up on food, come home, and forget what you went for in the first place? You have a problem more serious than litter, there, Bunky.
Styring also wants bins for trash collection, a plea that convinces me that she is too young to have ever known the joys of a Saab 96, rallying or otherwise; for one of the enchantingly practical elements of that car--one that cemented my desire to buy one, in fact--was the fact that it had two, two plastic bins for trash, neatly clipped to the sides of the driver's and passenger's footwells. In my car, these bins were usually filled with road flares, tools, spare ignition points, and a pint can of brake fluid, but they were also useful to fill with enough ice to chill a couple of bottles of beer on occasion. As for other thoughtful touches, the 96 had a glovebox door that opened to become a small level table, with indents that served to keep soda cans or water bottles in place, at least if you were parked. And with the rear seat folded down, the car had so much storage capacity that I once hauled home an entire field-dressed moose, hide and all. Yes, it was fairly small, for a moose, but still.
When I graduated from the noble Saab 96 to a true sports car--that is, a car with no room for anything--I was sad to lose the trash bins. But hey, it's a rally car; that's what the navigator's footwell is for.

This article originally appeared in the March, 2011 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.